Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We are looking at Dublin as a city, and the thing people want most is a reliable transport system. The reliability is more important than frequency. Frequency is obviously brilliant because if a service goes missing, the next one comes along and if people know it is coming every 15 minutes and guaranteed to get them in by a certain journey time, they buy into that. People have bought into the Luas. The Minister saw the figures, and we know the figures. It has sucked in people from 15- to 20-minute walks away because they will walk that far to get to the Luas. They know they do not have to worry about the frequency or the journey time once they get there.

The challenge is the congestion on many of the routes. The 11 route is not a reliable route at any level of traffic. It is fine at 11.30 p.m. It does not get passengers because it gets too congested. There are too many of those routes and not enough BusConnects-type routes, and many of our routes will never work that way. In the longer term, where does the Minister see demand management working in the sense of encouraging people to take the train, for example, because the fare is so much cheaper than driving to Cork, Limerick, Sligo or Galway? We could also allow people to more easily bring bikes on trains. It is possible but not easy. In other countries, people can literally hang their bikes up in the carriage and keep an eye on it. They do not have to worry about whether there will be space for it at the end of the train. The push factors out of the car are one thing and the pull factors onto public transport are the other. What else does the Minister think we can do to incentivise people to get out of their cars and onto public transport?